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If you are a fan of Dell’s premium business XPS series but not a big fan of the price, the Latitude 13 7370 is an excellent alternative. It’s much like the more expensive XPS 13 but also offers a passive cooling solution resulting in a silent working environment even under heavy workload. Aside from the silent operation, the Latitude 13 7370 has several other key selling points like robust, premium and simplistic design with an excellent choice of materials, portable dimensions and weight, long battery life (at least for some versions of the laptop) and comfortable input devices.

However, there are some limitations to the current configuration that we’ve addressed in our review. For instance, you won’t get the full XPS 13 performance since the ultrabook has a Core m7-6Y75 mobile SoC that can’t keep the Turbo Boost frequency up for a long time and we’ve noticed that you can’t turn off the adaptive brightness of the display. The latter is quite frustrating and can affect battery life in mostly negative way – it’s always good to have the option of manual brightness control. In any case, it’s a notebook excelling in so many areas that it makes a compelling case for being your next premium business daily driver. Find out why in the review below.

Retail package

The retail box doesn’t offer anything out of the ordinary – just the usual user manuals, AC adapter and power cord.

Design and construction

The overall appearance of the laptop resembles the one of the XPS 13 but there are a few significant differences. However, none of them result in lower-grade build quality. We still have aluminum and carbon fiber as base materials for the base and the lid. This has resulted in extremely light and durable chassis while the nearly borderless display, which Dell calls InfinityEdge, shrinks the footprint of the laptop to comparable 12-inch ultrabook. Features that we’ve already seen in the XPS series.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have the chance to get the touch-enabled version of the notebook because it has a stunning carbon fiber plate used for the lid so our standard configuration uses a thick anodized aluminum backplate. Luckily, this doesn’t take away the rigidity of the lid – it feels rock-solid with great resistance to pressure, torsion and twisting. The center of the lid sinks in ever so slightly under great pressure and doesn’t cause ripples to appear on the LCD screen. Sadly, as with every anodized aluminum finish, this one is also a fingerprint magnet and they seem to be pretty prominent due to the slightly darker tone of the gray. Also, since the display uses a wide single-hinge design, the lid is very resistant to twisting but since the hinge is so tightly pulled, it doesn’t allow opening the machine with just one hand. At least this eliminates any sway when working on an unstable surface and isn’t prone to wobbling on the touch version. As for the bottom, it uses soft-touch matte plastic finish instead of aluminum plate which improves the grip but attracts fingerprints as well.

The sides are impressively slim measuring at just 14.32 mm while still offering more than you could ask from a 13-inch mobile workforce. The left side packs not one, but two USB-C 3.1 connectors supporting Thunderbolt 3. However, only one of them will be available for use while charging. There’s also the mini HDMI port and the SIM card tray as the notebook supports 4G LTE connectivity. The right side adopts a single USB 3.0 port, a 3.5 mm audio jack and an SD card reader. Some users might complain about the lack of another USB-A connector but we can let that one pass sine we have two Thunderbolt 3-capable USB-C ports. Since each one supports 40 Gbps bandwidth, you can stick a lot of I/Os in there using a USB-C hub.

Opening the ultrabook reveals a relatively familiar sight. The interior is made of black, matte, soft-touch plastic while still being supported by carbon fiber base beneath. It’s just that the finish isn’t transparent as the one on the XPS 13 and you can’t see the carbon threads. In any case, we are impressed by the excellent durability, feel and somehow fingerprints and smudges remain fairly invisible. As far as the keyboard and touchpad are concerned, they are just excellent. It’s exactly what we’ve expected from a high-end 13-inch business laptop. The keys feel quite the same as the XPS 13’s with fairly long travel and clicky tactile feedback with the only difference being in the keycaps. They are typical for the Latitude lineup with slightly concaved center for extra comfort while typing. The touchpad also takes a more Latitude-like approach with separate mouse buttons but the trackpad surface remains just as responsive, accurate and easy to use.

Quite frankly, we don’t have anything to complain about. We can give the notebook a solid 10 out of 10 for exceptional build quality, dimensions, weight (just 1.2 kg) and nearly perfect input devices. The only small miss is the anodized aluminum on the lid that attracts smudges and oily fingers. Also, you might want to consider the absence of a second USB-A connector but then again, the two Thunderbolt 3 give you a wide range of choice for USB-C hubs expanding your I/Os beyond the limit.

Disassembly, maintenance and upgrade options

Just like every other ultrabook out there, the Latitude 7370 doesn’t have a dedicated service lid but it’s super easy to open for upgrade and maintenance. Just unscrew all the bolts at the bottom and pry up the plate gently.

Storage upgrades – M.2 SSD

Storage options are limited due to the form factor of the device so you can only benefit from the M.2 PCIe NVMe-enabled SSD slot. In our case, the unit came equipped with a Lite-On 2280 M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD with 256GB capacity.

RAM

Another drawback of getting an ultraportable is the limited upgradability. And by limited upgradability, we don’t refer to the storage only – we are talking about memory. The laptop we got sports 8GB of LPDDR3-1866 soldered RAM, which should be fine for the usual web browsing, office work and some multitasking on the side.

Other components

The Wi-Fi module is near the upper right corner (with the bottom facing upwards) and it’s Intel 8260NGW.

The battery is rather small (just 34Wh) but to be honest, you can’t really expect wonders inside such small and compact chassis.

Cooling system

As we stated earlier, the system relies on a passive cooling solution since the 4.5W TDP SoC allows such implementation. This means that the performance of the CPU strongly relies on the cooling design but our stress tests point out that there shouldn’t be any problems.

Display quality

The ultrabook’s display uses a 13.3-inch Full HD (1920×1080) IPS panel from Sharp with model number SHP1460 (LQ133M1). This means that the pixel pitch is 0.153 x 0.153 mm and the pixel density is 166 ppi. It can be considered as “Retina” when viewed from a distance equal or greater than 53 cm.

Viewing angles are excellent as you can see from the image below.

Since the notebook’s display has the so-called CABC (Content-adaptive backlight control) and Dell hasn’t provided an option to turn off this feature. This means that some of the results may have a slight deviation.

The maximum recorded brightness in the middle of the screen is 442 cd/m2 and the average across the surface is 389 cd/m2, which means that the maximum deviation is 18%. Color temperature is 7400K at maximum brightness so colors will appear slightly colder than they would be at optimal 6500K.

The maximum color deviation dE2000 is 4.3, which is slightly higher than the 4.0 mark. This is very important value especially when color sensitive work is involved. The contrast ratio is 1100:1.

Color reproduction

To make sure we are on the same page, we would like to give you a little introduction of the sRGB color gamut and the Adobe RGB. To start, there’s the CIE 1976 Uniform Chromaticity Diagram that represents the visible specter of colors by the human eye, giving you a better perception of the color gamut coverage and the color accuracy.

Inside the black triangle, you will see the standard color gamut (sRGB) that is being used by millions of people in HDTV and on the web. As for the Adobe RGB, this is used in professional cameras, monitors etc for printing. Basically, colors inside the black triangle are used by everyone and this is the essential part of the color quality and color accuracy of a mainstream notebook.

Still, we’ve included other color spaces like the famous DCI-P3 standard used by movie studios, as well as the digital UHD Rec.2020 standard. Rec.2020, however, is still a thing of the future and it’s difficult for today’s displays to cover that well. We’ve also included the so-called Michael Pointer gamut, or Pointer’s gamut, which represents the colors that naturally occur around us every day.

We are glad to report almost full sRGB color gamut coverage – 97%. This makes the screen useful not only for general browsing and work but for multimedia and in some cases design.

Below you will see practically the same image but with the color circles representing the reference colors and the white circles being the result. You can see main and additional colors with 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% saturation inside the sRGB gamut pre and post calibration.

The “Gaming and Web Design” profile is created at 140 cd/m2 brightness, D65 (6500K) white point and optimal gamma in sRGB mode.

We tested the accuracy of the display with 24 commonly used colors like light and dark human skin, blue sky, green grass, orange etc. You can check out the results at factory condition and also, with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile.

The next figure shows how well the display is able to reproduce really dark parts of an image, which is essential when watching movies or playing games in low ambient light.

The left side of the image represents the display with stock settings, while the right one is with the “Gaming and Web Design” profile activated. On the horizontal axis, you will find the grayscale and on the vertical axis – the luminance of the display. On the two graphs below you can easily check for yourself how your display handles the darkest nuances but keep in mind that this also depends on the settings of your current display, the calibration, the viewing angle and the surrounding light conditions.

Response time

We test the reaction time of the pixels with the usual “black-to-white” and “white-to-black” method from 10% to 90% and reverse.

We recorded Fall Time + Rise Time = 28 ms.

PWM (Screen flickering)

Pulse Width modulation (PWM) is an easy way to control monitor brightness. When you lower the brightness, the light intensity of the backlight is not lowered, but instead turned off and on by the electronics with a frequency indistinguishable to the human eye. In these light impulses the light/no-light time ratio varies, while brightness remains unchanged, which is harmful to your eyes. You can read more about that in our dedicated article on PWM.

We have good news for users with sensitive to PWM eyes – the screen doesn’t flicker at any brightness level making it comfortable for long hours of use.

Unfortunately, the screen uses PWM from 0 to 99% brightness but at high frequency – 19.5 kHz. This means that only users with sensitive eyes will feel the effects of the screen flickering.

Blue light emissions

Installing of our Health-Guard profile not only eliminates PWM but also reduces the harmful Blue Light emissions while keeping the colors of the screen perceptually accurate. If you’re not familiar with the Blue light, the TL;DR version is – emissions that negatively affect your eyes, skin, and your whole body. You can find more information about that in our dedicated article on Blue Light.

Conclusion

This is by far one of the best 13-inch Full HD displays we’ve tested. The notebook offers really high maximum brightness suitable for outdoor use even under direct sunlight – which is really important considering the form factor of the Latitude 7370 – it has almost full sRGB coverage, high contrast and you can get excellent color accuracy with our custom profiles. The only considerable drawback we could think of is the use of PWM from 0 to 99% brightness. Still, our Health-Guard profile can take care of that.

Buy our display profiles

Since our profiles are tailored for each individual display model, this article and its respective profile package is meant for Dell Latitude 7370 configurations with 13.3″ Sharp SHP1460 (LQ133M1) (FHD, 1920 × 1080) IPS screen and the laptop can be found at Amazon: http://amzn.to/2ugBrpV

*Should you have problems with downloading the purchased file, try using a different browser to open the link you’ll receive via e-mail. If the download target is a .php file instead of an archive, change the file extension to .zip or contact us at [email protected]

In addition to receiving efficient and health-friendly profiles, by buying LaptopMedia's products you also support the development of our labs, where we test devices in order to produce the most objective reviews possible.

Office Work

Office Work should be used mostly by users who spend most of the time looking at pieces of text, tables or just surfing. This profile aims to deliver better distinctness and clarity by keeping a flat gamma curve (2.20), native color temperature and perceptually accurate colors.

Design and Gaming

This profile is aimed at designers who work with colors professionally, and for games and movies as well. Design and Gaming takes display panels to their limits, making them as accurate as possible in the sRGB IEC61966-2-1 standard for Web and HDTV, at white point D65.

Health-Guard

THealth-Guard eliminates the harmful Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) and reduces the negative Blue Light which affects our eyes and body. Since it’s custom tailored for every panel, it manages to keep the colors perceptually accurate. Health-Guard simulates paper so the pressure on the eyes is greatly reduced.

Software

We used the pre-installed Windows 10 (64-bit) for the writing of this review but if you want to do a clean install of the OS without the bloatware, we suggest downloading all of the latest drivers from Dell’s official support page.

Battery

The most surprising thing about the Latitude 7370 is the small battery capacity of just 34Wh, which somehow is able to produce more than decent battery runtimes, at least when web browsing is concerned. However, on the video playback test, the score dropped significantly. In any case, it will get you through the day with a single charge depending on your usage habits.

There’s something we need to note here, though. We’ve tested the device with Windows battery saving feature turned on and Wi-Fi constantly running but since the device doesn’t allow the adaptive brightness to be turned off (more on that later), we determined that at 50% brightness, the display’s luminance is close to the 120 cd/m2 target luminance.

Web browsing

In order to simulate real-life conditions, we used our own script for automatic web browsing through over 70 websites.

Video playback

Gaming

We recently started using F1 2015’s built-in benchmark on loop in order to simulate real-life gaming.

Of course, the laptop isn’t made for gaming but it’s good to know that it can last almost three hours under heavy load – 178 minutes (2 hours and 48 minutes).

CPU – Intel Core m7-6Y75

The Core m7-6Y75 is a super-efficient low TDP processor from Intel’s Skylake family built on the 14nm node offering two cores with Hyper-Threading. The base operating frequency of the cores is 1.2 GHz but can go up to 3.1 GHz for a short period of time. However, if the workload utilizes all two cores, the maximum clock speeds are limited to 2.9 GHz and can be sustained just for a short period of time depending on the notebook’s cooling solution. Speaking of which, the CPU is designed to be implemented into small 2-in-1 devices, tablets and ultrabooks with passive cooling solution. Thanks to the short burst frequency, the chip is able to match the Core i5-6200U CPU when it comes to short benchmark tests but its performance drops significantly over time.

The whole SoC’s TDP is rated at 4.5W including the memory controller and the integrated GPU. The memory controller supports dual-channel LPDDR3-1866/DDR3L-1600 RAM chips while the GPU is Intel HD Graphics 515. The latter can be found in the rest of the CPUs from the same family – Core m3 and m5 and here, the GPU is clocked at 300 – 1000 MHz. What’s interesting, though, is that the CPU also offers Intel’s vPro technology pack aimed at business-oriented users along with all the usual features that all high-end CPUs have.

Fritz

Fritz is a chess benchmark that tests the computing capabilities of the CPU with various chess moves. The Intel Core m7-6Y75 scored 6.891 million moves per second. In comparison, one of the most powerful chess computers, Deep(er) Blue, was able to squeeze out 200 million moves per second. In 1997 Deep(er) Blue even beat the famous Garry Kasparov with 3.5 to 2.5.

Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)

Dell Latitude 13 7370 CPU variants

Here you can see an approximate comparison between the CPUs that can be found in the Dell Latitude 13 7370 models on the market. This way you can decide for yourself which Dell Latitude 13 7370 model is the best bang for your buck.

Note: The chart shows the cheapest different CPU configurations so you should check what the other specifications of these laptops are by clicking on the laptop’s name / CPU.

Results are from the Fritz chess benchmark (the higher the score, the better)

Results are from our Photoshop benchmark test (the lower the score, the better)

GPU – Intel HD Graphics 515

Normally, the Intel HD Graphics 515 can be found on the latest Core m Skylake SoCs but it’s considered as a low-end iGPU. It represents the GT2 variants of the Skylake iGPUs and features 24 of the so-called EUs (Execution Units). They are clocked at 300 MHz and can go up to 1000 MHz but that depends on the CPU model.

Intel claims about 40% better performance than the last HD Graphics 5300 (Broadwell) generation GPUs, but that is strongly dependent on the CPU model and the TDP so statistics may vary. However, there are some notable features that come along with the HD Graphics 515 like H.265/HEVC fully hardware decoded and supports outputs like DP 1.2 / eDP 1.3 and HDMI 1.4a. The GPU can handle up to three displays connected simultaneously.

The power consumption of the whole SoC may vary, but most of the time it’s 4.5W. Nevertheless, it can go down to 3.5W or go up to 7W. These numbers include the CPU, iGPU and the memory controller.

Results are from the Unigine Superposition benchmark (higher the score, the better)

Temperatures

Although the notebook isn’t made for prolonged and heavy workload like 100% CPU and GPU load but it’s still the best way to determine the overall stability and effectiveness of the cooling system.

We ran the CPU workload for about an hour and for the first few seconds the CPU’s clock speeds reached 2.8 GHz, which is just 100 MHz short of the maximum 2.9 GHz for two active cores. Then, the processor toned down at around 1.5-1.6 GHz (still above the base 1.2 GHz) and stayed there until the end.

After an hour, we turned on the GPU stress test as well and expectedly, the CPU’s frequency dropped at around 800 MHz so it can give enough headroom for the GPU to perform.

We’ve also measured the temperatures on the surface and as you can see from the heat map below, there’s nothing alarming. All in all, we can say that Dell was able to implement the Core m7-6Y75 quite well and squeeze out almost the maximum performance out of the SoC. This is a great plus because some devices with the same or similar processors aren’t able to utilize the full performance of the chip and end up crippled.

Verdict

Although the Latitude 7370 costs a pretty penny, this portable ultrabook definitely makes your head earned money worthwhile. Not only does the notebook check all the boxes from our list of features we would like to see from such device but it’s also something more. The Latitude 7370 impresses with excellent build quality, premium feel, comfortable input devices and a decent range of I/O that includes not one but two USB-C 3.1 Thunderbolt ports.

We continue with the excellent display quality and long battery life – the former uses a high-quality Sharp Full HD IPS panel that puts other 13.3-inch screens to shame. Impressively high maximum brightness, high contrast ratio and wide sRGB coverage. Paired with our custom profiles, the notebook can be used for color sensitive work on the go as well. The only deal-breaker for some users might be the presence of PWM but luckily, we have a solution for that as well. Our Health-Guard profile will not only limit the blue light emissions but also eliminate the screen flickering. And as for battery life, it’s not the best we’ve seen but it’s definitely among the best. It should last almost a full work day on a single charge thanks to the energy efficient 4.5W TDP SoC.

Speaking of which, we are pleased to see that the laptop being able to utilize almost the full performance of the Core m7-6Y75 sustaining the 2.8 GHz Turbo Boost speed for quite a while before going back to 1.5 – 1.6 GHz. This is a very important aspect to consider since not all notebooks that come with a passive cooling solution handle the SoC that well.

So is the Latitude 7370 worth it? Yes, it surely is as long as you are willing to spend so much money on an ultraportable business laptop with a mobile SoC that lacks a second USB-A connector and doesn’t allow you to adjust the maximum brightness and contrast. Nevertheless, it has all the essential features a business user would want but keep in mind that there are other 13-inch alternatives with ULV (ultra-low voltage) CPUs delivering considerably better performance at the same price. Of course, they come with their own shortcomings as well. The HP Spectre 13, HP Spectre x360 13 and the Lenovo Yoga 910 are one of them but to be honest, only the last two should be considered seriously.

Cons

Author: Kroum NikolovAn engineer with over thirty years of experience in the realm of electronics. High technology has always been an integral part of his life, driving him to constantly face the challenges it presents head on.